12

Modern Business Geography

swing Galloway

Fig. 10. The weaving room in a modern cotton factory at Lowell, Massachusetts.

it is cast into the mouth of a machine to be cleaned. In the cleaning
machine the fibers are thoroughly picked apart, so that all the dirt
collected in the field or on the journey to the mill may drop out.
How cotton is spun. Let us follow our cotton hastily through the
many processes of the mill. There are more than forty steps to be
taken before it becomes finished cloth, but we shall observe only the
main ones.
Spinning is one of the chief steps. To prepare the cotton for spinning,
 a great machine brushes it, straightening out tangles and carefully
 arranging the fibers in parallel order. The machine delivers
the cotton in the form of a thick, porous ribbon called a sliver.”
The sliver is passed through set after set of rollers which gradually
pull it into a soft, fuzzy thread. Many threads are then twisted together
 by a spinning machine. The twisting makes strong, compact,
smooth “yarn,” such as the thread we buy for sewing.
We can get a good notion of how thread is spun by pulling a bit of
cotton batting or absorbent cotton from a roll and twisting it between
the thumb and forefinger. We should have difficulty in making a
smooth thread of uniform firmness. Yet in ancient times spinning
was carried on in almost this way. Even now, in backward regions
such as the interior of China, central Brazil, and remote parts of
India, people employ this crude method of spinning cotton for
their simple clothing. Progressive peoples early began to in-